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Fan Mission: A House of Locked Secrets by Gelo "Moonbo" Fleisher (2015/05/28)


Moonbo

A House of Locked Secrets (by Gelo "Moonbo" Fleisher)  

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Hey hanmin, glad you enjoyed the mission!

 

 

 

 

1) check the guard shack near the start.

 

2) check the pews in the manor chapel. This will no longer work after you liberate the family.

 

 

 

Edit: thanks oldjim!

Edited by Moonbo

But you should walk having internal dignity. Be a wonderful person who can dance pleasantly to the rhythm of the universe.

-Sun Myung Moon

 

My work blog: gfleisher.blogspot.com

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Ah so you got to the spirit world from james room? The second lockpick should be on the letter in that room.

 

Aaaand it was. I'd not even noticed it on the letter. Darn it.

 

 

Also, I'd found my way to the attic with the heart before, and tried to destroy it. I hacked it with my sword, shot fire arrows on it, etc. etc. I didn't realize I was supposed to grab it.

In any case, now that's done, one of four mysteries solved, and I've moved onto the library. Gosh, when I went inside, I got a total Thief II flashback. Loved it :wub:

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There may be spoilers in my review so i will spoiler tag the whole post

 

 

Been away for almost a year from the mod and thought this would be a nice map to start my reboot with...Holy shit Moonbo!! I played Requiem and this is even more insane in every department! At first one think "Yeah, this back yard is quite nice modelled and lots of details. Maybe it's done now...Oh, a mansion heist? Totally beautiful interior and detailing and sound and immersion. Scary ass hell to! I jumped high when I entered the first tomb when the spirit adressed me directly. And when he started to throw junk at me I was both scared and amazed at the same time!

 

The other time my pants almost saw brown colour, was when I was in the small room with the note about "When the bad man comes, you can only hide." It got real pannicky there because I didn't find the empty cupboard so after some painful punches from the bad man, I had to reload. The puzzles where perfectly difficult and not frustrating at all. The only time my solution/spoiler reading nerve itched, was at the end and how to deal with Thomas. Then I found out that his hammer was his relic and into the spirit realm I went!

 

With your mission it never ends! I sit there and play and like "Okay, so this is where I shall go...maybe it's another hallway. Yes it is, and it's beautifully decorated with loads of custom stuff...Oh, another nicely decorated room...A relic. Let's enter...WOW!! Some kind of dream land with falling brimstone and scary platforms...The whole time! Just Wow, WOW, WOOOW!!!" It never ends with your missions! It's just one hystericaly complex and painstakingly detailed and throughly epic room after another!!! One just cannot take in how much details you've crammed into the map. Every nook and cranny is detailed with either dirt, a pile of rocks, or creepy dark men with red eyes!

 

I wish I had half the creativity you have. Thousands of thanks to you and the people in the credits for this masterpiece! Of course I rated 5/5/5

 

Edited by Fieldmedic
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@ Moonbo & Oldjim,

 

many thanks.

I delivered the package

called the crown and also the cup. I've loaded older saves and searched all spirit areas but could not find whatever goes in the third jar

 

 

@all

3: Where should I look

for the third item

?

 

4: In the real world

chapel

is one door

to a small room I have no key for and that is not pickable

. Is there a way to enter this with difficulty "saint"? 4.1: How?

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I have the exact same problem as prjames. Also, same OS, same (I think) graphics card, but supposedly 4Gb RAM - Everest displays it as "3584 Mb".

 

Now, some people above suggested adding "image_downSizeLimit "256"" and/or "seta image_preload "0"", and I'd be willing to experiment, but where exactly am I supposed to add these? Are these supposed to go in an .ini file, and if so, where is it; or are they command line parameters, and what would be the full command line; or what?

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@Fieldmedic & Melan, Wow, I can only be humbled when I read a review like that. Thank you for spending the time to write it up :-). Regarding "going pro", I am actually about to release a small indie game that my brother and I built, but its very, very different than my Dark Mod work (as its a family-friendly edutainment game). I'll drop a post in the Off Topic forum when it's ready to go.


@hanmin


check out the spiritual version of the Library.



-Gelo

Edited by Moonbo
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But you should walk having internal dignity. Be a wonderful person who can dance pleasantly to the rhythm of the universe.

-Sun Myung Moon

 

My work blog: gfleisher.blogspot.com

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Smaller textures take less memory at the expense of visuals. I think Mortem Desino went down to 32

and TDM looked like Thief 1. It's possible you can get it to run like that, yes.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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This reminded me a lot of the Zelda games that use a parallel world mechanic. It does have the side-effect that the sense of working out what the mapper intends me to do is quite strong, especially since it's divided into fairly discrete challenges with the fixed entry and exit points for the spirit realm, but it's a really interesting way to present an explorable environment, and to my mind better integrated into the logic of the game than what Robbing the Cradle tried to do with its present/past shift.

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Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Wow, was this a great two mission pack! Beautiful, engaging, scary.

 

 

When that note told me to hide from the bad man and then he came in, I screamed like a little girl. And that guy was super hard to take out. At one point he was fast both in the real world and the spirit world. That, plus the zombies, I was sure I wouldn't be able to finish at all.

But I did finish in the end, with 12 of 15 secrets found.

 

The North Wing puzzle was the hardest for me personally to solve, but the they were all wonderfully challenging.

 

Question:

Was there something underneath the stairs in the library? Size-wise I thought something could fit in there, but I found no levers or toggles or buttons, etc.

Just wondering.

 

Is there a secret list floating around somewhere? Not that I recall off the top of my head which I found....

 

Voted 5 on all counts. Would have voted higher if I could've :D Excellent missions, Moonbo!

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Re library stairs

there is a secret there so you need to look a bit harder :D

 

 

I figured as much. But I found no way down there, if there's a space. Moonbo is clever with his secrets.

One thing I didn't try was access via the spirit world.

Hmm, maybe I need to replay the whole mission pack :D

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@Summer, thanks for the kind review! A secret list (and loot list?) might be a great project for someone to start putting together on this thread based off of everyone's discoveries :-).

But you should walk having internal dignity. Be a wonderful person who can dance pleasantly to the rhythm of the universe.

-Sun Myung Moon

 

My work blog: gfleisher.blogspot.com

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Definitely my new #1 favorite Dark Mod mission here, maybe even my favorite Thief mission all of all time. Even the first "tutorial" mission was really good once you got past the initial part of the priest telling you how to use the symbol. I did not find all secrets in either mission and was missing over 1000 loot in the 2nd mission, so there's definitely room for replay.

 

This mission is as long as Requiem was but less linear, and had a lot of really interesting elements to it. Parts of it such as the spirit world shifting remind me of parts of some of the greatest Thief missions I've ever played such as the final mission of the T2 campaign The Black Frog. None of the puzzles would stump you if you thought logically about them, except maybe the final part where it's not so obvious what you need to do. Lots of exploration, quite a few secrets to find and the story of the mission was again pretty good and built on some of the TDM mythos as well as some of your own from your last mission.

 

The only real shame here is I think how small the Thief/TDM community is and how comparitvely few people will end up playing this for how good it is. This mission is so good that if this mission alone were some standalone small indie game sold on Steam or something I bet it'd have had quite the following when comparing to the quality of just about every other short few hours long indie game out there. Really well done here. When you announced you'd be making another mission I thought it'd be good, but this exceeded any expectations I think anyone had. Does have a bit of performance issues but that's not that huge a deal except on lower end systems, I'm sure..

Edited by GUFF
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Thanks GUFF and ScottyB for the kind words :-). While recognition is always nice, I don't think anybody develops for TDM with plans for riches and fame. I do plan to do more work on indie games in the future, but one thing I'll miss about the TDM experience (and modding in general) is that in a lot of ways its a unique opportunity to have access to a really professional tool set (unlike in indie games where you have to build everything by yourself). I mean, the chances of anyone outside of the AAA environment even getting to map for a FPS game is really rare, and for a FPS game with the in-depth mechanics of TDM is just about impossible. So I guess that's the trade off. But hopefully the stuff I've been learning will help rub off on my future indie work too ... I guess only time will tell.

 

And at least I'm glad that there's a group of people who seem to be enjoying the missions!

  • Like 1

But you should walk having internal dignity. Be a wonderful person who can dance pleasantly to the rhythm of the universe.

-Sun Myung Moon

 

My work blog: gfleisher.blogspot.com

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When you build, do you search the net for inspiration on architecture and design? Or do you have a lot of knowledge on how to implement your ideas/design into the mission. What I feel is lacking in my own missions is the feel of "Wow, this looks just like it could if this were a real world". I have taken inspiration from your map and now I will painstakingly detail my world in absurdum! When it gets released it may not be a huge mission but damn is it gonna be detailed...!

 

How do you go about when you map? :)

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Wonderful advice! I'm building a city section. No actual plans of what the mission shall be about right now, just plain building of a middle class street, and when some idea pops up, I'll implement it. My inspiration to build is like a feather in the wind; I have to grab it when it flows by, or else I won't even start mapping...

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